Doctors is a British medical soap opera, first broadcast on BBC One on 26 March 2000 and concluded on 14 November 2024. Filmed in Birmingham and set in the fictional West Midlands town of Letherbridge, the soap follows the lives of the staff of both an NHS doctor's surgery and a university campus surgery, as well as the lives of their families and friends. Initially, only 41 episodes of the programme were ordered, but due to the positive reception, the BBC ordered it as a continuing soap opera. Doctors was filmed at the Pebble Mill Studios until 2004; production then relocated to the BBC Drama Village, where it filmed until 2024. Episodes were filmed three months prior to transmission and were typically broadcast Mondays to Thursdays at 2:00 pm on BBC One, as well as having classic episodes broadcast on Drama. It took three annual transmission breaks across the year: at Easter, during the summer and at Christmas.

During its tenure, Doctors consistently won the share of viewers in its daytime time slot, and in 2023, it averaged 1.6 million live viewers. The programme was nominated for and won numerous awards, with critics praising it for tackling issues that were considered controversial and taboo. The longest-serving cast member was Adrian Lewis Morgan, who portrayed Jimmi Clay from 2005 until the final episode. Alongside its regular cast, Doctors featured numerous guest characters who typically appeared in an episode as part of a self-contained "story of the day". Series producer Peter Eryl Lloyd estimated that at least 800 guest actors were contracted on the soap per year. Due to the large number of actors who made a guest appearance, Doctors gained a reputation for becoming "a British actor's rite of passage". In October 2023, the BBC announced that Doctors had been cancelled due to financing issues, a decision that was met with universal criticism.

Doctors was produced by BBC Birmingham and was screened on BBC One. It was created by Chris Murray, with Mal Young as the original executive producer. Musician Paul Hemmings was hired to compose the theme music for the opening and closing titles. When the series premiered, Jane Lush, the BBC's head of daytime programming, felt that commissioning Doctors was an ambitious move. She thought that the series offered something new and that viewers would not realise they would want a series like Doctors until they had seen it. Lush noted that despite its serial element, the premise of the programme meant that people could "dip in and out" since the core cast would stay the same and the episodes would be self-contained with a "story of the day". Young echoed Lush's comments and had wanted to create a daytime drama series long before his involvement with Doctors. Young felt that the previously unfilled daytime slot would be good due to there being an increase of remote workers in 2000. Doctors was originally shown at 12:30 pm as a lead-in to BBC News at One. For a brief trial period in mid-2000, certain episodes from the first series were shown on Fridays at 7:00 pm, but due to rival soap Emmerdale being transmitted at the same time, they suffered from low ratings, and were instead trialled in a 2:10 pm time slot. The series later moved into a 1:45 pm timeslot in 2008. In its final year of transmission, the timeslot was changed to 2:00 pm. Cast member Diane Keen opined that Doctors should be broadcast in a primetime slot, but Liam Keelan, controller of BBC Daytime schedules, commented: "its true home will always be as a hugely appreciated early afternoon drama".

In a 2010 review of BBC continuing dramas, it was reported by Digital Spy that Doctors regularly won the largest share in its time slot, and attracted consistent audience numbers, with an average of 2 million viewers per episode. In 2020, executive producer Mike Hobson was asked by Allison Jones of Inside Soap if he would consider a late-night time slot, to which he commented: "for our audience, we sit quite nicely". He felt that if the soap was shown at night, producers would "still tackle all the powerful subject matters [they do now], and that seeing more sexual or swearing scenes would not add to the quality of the programme". In February 2022, it was announced that alongside its afternoon transmission on BBC One, episodes would be repeated at 7:00 pm on BBC Two. Kate Oates, head of continuing drama at the BBC, said that her motivation to give Doctors a primetime evening slot was to give the programme a push for a new audience. The change took place from 7 March 2022. Despite being billed as a permanent change, the BBC Two repeats were dropped from the schedule after two months.

Classic episodes of Doctors were screened on Gold in 2005, but the screenings eventually ceased. Demand garnered for the classic episodes to return, and in 2023, Gold's sister channel, Drama, attained the rights for them. They have been airing two Classic Doctors episodes every weekday at 8:00 am from 14 August 2023.

Doctors filmed episodes three months in advance of their broadcast. The episodes were filmed from January to November, and due to the effect weather had on the output, producers implemented "seasonal episodes" to give the impression that the soap was set in real time. Episodes were filmed in groups of three, described as a "block". Each group of three episodes had the same production crew and it typically took seven days to shoot each block. Usually, two blocks are filmed at once, although, there were many instances where three blocks were filmed at once. In these instances, regular cast members would be filming from nine to twelve episodes within the same period of time. In 2002, in the wake of the death of the Queen Mother, Doctors was pulled from the schedule to report on her death. However, the episode had been self-contained and focused completely on the "story of the day", meaning it could be transmitted at any point in the series. Crew member Peter Eryl Lloyd said that led to the invention of "lifesavers", a "story of the day"-led episode that could be transmitted at any given point.

On his experience on the soap, cast member Christopher Timothy said: "The budget was a joke and the pressure more intense than anything I'd ever experienced. But it was six years of great fun". Each of the regular cast members was allocated a private dressing room, while guests and recurring cast were given a shared dressing room behind the wardrobe department.

From 2000 to 2004, Doctors was filmed at the BBC's Pebble Mill studios in Edgbaston. The series used space originally occupied by Pebble Mill at One. A set was built especially for the series, with the BBC hoping that the series would become a "fixture of daytime schedules" like fellow BBC soap Neighbours. After the closure of Pebble Mill, BBC Birmingham moved to a smaller production base in Birmingham city centre which had no studio space for the show. In 2004, production moved again to the BBC Drama Village development in Selly Oak. To explain the transition between locations on screen, the soap featured a storyline in which the Riverside Health Centre is destroyed by an explosion, prompting the move to the Mill Health Centre, named after the series' original production home.